Chris Selley: Justin Trudeau is just your average centrist Grit

Justin Trudeau is just your average centrist Grit

“Wheels down in Calgary,” Justin Trudeau tweeted on Wednesday. “En route to Dalmesh Seniors Centre to talk about change.”

Coming from an ambulatory policy vacuum, it almost reads like self-parody. (Only change? What of hope?) But in the absence of many concrete thoughts from the Liberal heir-apparent on much of anything, “change” is being projected on to the blank screen. In The Globe and Mail this week, John Ibbitson urged Mr. Trudeau to reject the advice of the out-of-touch “Laurentian elites” who will try to glom on to his campaign. And Lawrence Martin had similar concerns about the old guard watering down Mr. Trudeau’s message: “His appeal should be one of broad scope,” Mr. Martin wrote. “It should be nothing less than an appeal to ‘change the system’” — a “new democracy.”

Amidst all this transformational rhetoric, at his Tuesday night campaign launch in Montreal, Mr. Trudeau positioned himself as an utterly conventional, somewhat left-leaning Liberal — think Gerard Kennedy with better bloodlines. He supports “a compassionate society,” medicare, “an open and broad” and environmentally sustainable economy, balanced budgets, a thriving middle class, “an independent foreign policy” that prosecutes wars when necessary, civil liberties and official bilingualism. He will neither “sow regional resentment and blame the successful,” as he says the NDP does, nor “privilege one sector over others and promise that wealth will trickle down, eventually,” as he says the Conservatives do.

“[Canadians] do not see themselves or their values reflected in Ottawa,” he said. “My friends, we will do better.”

Ho and, if you will, hum. But then again, maybe Justin Trudeau really is an utterly conventional, somewhat left-leaning Liberal.

It shouldn’t come as a shock. The policy cupboard is mostly bare. But he certainly reacts to contentious issues like your average excitable, hyper-politically-correct Grit: He famously denounced the use of the word “barbaric” to describe female circumcision in the new citizenship guide, then couldn’t explain his objections. This week he joined the mob in condemning Status of Women Minister Rona Ambrose’s vote on Steven Woodworth’s motion to examine the legal definition of personhood, calling it “the height of hypocrisy” when it was quite clearly the opposite.

He spouts tiresome exaggerations about “Stephen Harper’s Canada,” once even suggesting its full realization would drive him to the separatist camp. (In fact, one of the few strident positions he has ever held was firm opposition to the Québécois nationhood resolution. He might not wish to publicize that nowadays.) One of his key advisors is former Liberal MP Pablo Rodriguez, author of the Kyoto Implementation Act, which sought to embarrass the Conservatives for not meeting emissions targets that the Liberals agreed to and never tried to meet in the first place.

This is a long way from a “new democracy.”

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The only real appeal to change Mr. Trudeau made in his Tuesday speech was to evidence-based policymaking, which is a great idea in principle — but the Liberals already think of themselves as that party, the long-gun registry and miserable failure on climate change notwithstanding. It’s impossible to take at face value from any politician — politics wins over science, always — especially once you hear Mr. Trudeau’s position on legalizing marijuana.

“There’s a lot of good arguments that say that pot is not as dangerous as tobacco and alcohol, and those are legalized,” he told Red Dot Project, an “issues-based media centre,” in January. “However, if you look at the big narrative, we’re trying to … reduce the consumption of alcohol [and] tobacco, and we’re trying to encourage people to be healthier and to be more engaged with the world.

“One of the things that pot does is disconnects you a little bit from the world; it’s not great for your health. So I don’t know if legalizing it — although I totally understand the arguments around removing the criminality, the criminal element and all that — I don’t know that it’s entirely consistent with the kind of society we’re trying to build.”

None of this is a criticism of Mr. Trudeau. I would love to see a more intelligent brand of politics in Ottawa, and I would be happy for Mr. Trudeau to champion it, but that’s not his problem. He has many months to lay out interesting ideas. But for now, he seems to put a fresh face on most of the same old centrist package, which has been almost entirely co-opted by the Conservatives and New Democrats. That might be a plausible route to Liberal rebirth, but it’s not very ambitious. And it doesn’t justify the transformational rhetoric some observers use to describe his campaign.

In the wake of a Grammy Awards ceremony that disappointed many, from Kanye West to the masses on Twitter lamenting the state of pop music, a historical perspective is key. Few are better poised to offer one than Andy Kim.